Looking at CATs: memoQ

We’re really enjoying learning about different CAT tools from professional linguists! For today’s edition of Looking at CATs, we’re investigating memoQ the top memoQ Translation Memory features.

Davide Grillo is a professional Italian translator and proofreader, working from English and Spanish. He studied Foreign Languages and Literatures, and now works in various fields, from advertising to fashion, marketing, IT and literature. He told us about his experiences using memoQ 2013 R2, and why he chooses it over any other tool on the market.

Why did you choose memoQ?

When I decided I had to look around to see if technology really could help us translators in our work, I downloaded and tried almost all of the CATs on the market (some following friends’ advice, others after long research on the web). I can easily say that I immediately loved memoQ. It was easy, it was fast, it was powerful, and, even during the trial period, it never crashed or caused me any headaches with errors of any kind. In the following months I discovered its customizing functions, the great possibilities for managing TMs, term bases and other supplying resources, its compatibility, the number of file types handled, and memoQ became my choice.

What are the 5 best memoQ Translation Memory features?

1 – Probably the very first things are its great ease of use and its beautiful layout, although it is a complete and powerful standalone piece of translation software. In no time you can manage to productively work on long and complex jobs.

2 – Compatibility. You really don’t need any other tool. memoQ supports practically every file format and other tools’ files as well, so you don’t have to worry about annoyingly specific requests from clients. It provides great filtering functions (with great cascading filters functionality for complex files), but most of the time it will do the job for you automatically.

3 – LiveDocs and Muses – they represent a great resource for your daily translations. memoQ can automatically check already translated files and other files as well from a resource corpus that you can upload and manage, providing you with relevant and useful suggestions, other than the classic TM and TB entries.

4 – Another feature I find very useful is the monolingual review. You can now export your translation, review it outside of memoQ and reimport the file back. The tool will also track every change and save a record of all of the different versions of the file.

5 – Great support. I dealt with them once or twice and they answered back rapidly and kindly. One last thing – I really like the spirit of the guys at Kilgray (see Zen, the fantastic “don’t press” button and their marketing style in general…).

What would you improve about memoQ if you could?

Really I don’t know – from my point of view now, I don’t miss any specific function. Probably the only thing that comes to my mind is that it can do a lot more than you actually use, so that if you want to use 100% of its features, you have to study a bit…but I think that’s quite normal.

Do you think the use of memoQ improves your productivity or quality?

For sure. I am much more productive with this tool than before, and further, in addition to the obvious Translation Memory benefits (which I do not explain here), I really think I got used to its convenient layout (and its potential customization) to the point that I’m even faster. So, I’m faster, I’m more accurate, and I save a lot of time because I don’t have to think about the formatting and layout of the final doc.

As a translator, do you see a benefit to owning more than one tool?

Well…no! This is a simple question that would need a complex answer, but I’ll try to clearly explain my idea: some years ago this might have been possible, since there were a lot of proprietary formats connected with proprietary tools, and you could not deal with different clients using different tools if you didn’t own those tools. Now it is different, the compatibility level has increased a lot, and interchangeable formats have been developed, so there is no need to passively follow client requests, you are more free to choose your tool and work with it, which is how it should be!